FREEDOM

The Happy Hypocrite

Lynne Tillman (Guest Ed.)

The newest issue of The Happy Hypocrite challenges restraining notions found in art and writing about who can and cannot speak—and, in response to Kafka, to what we don’t know has damaged us. Freedom is a complicated word, in which and beside which so much hypocrisy lives. With a range of new contributions, including texts by Gregg Bordowitz, Paul Chan, Lydia Davis, Yasmine El-Rashidi, Ed Halter, James Jennings, Allison Katz, Craig Owens, Sarah Resnick, Ranbir Sidhu and Abdellah Taia; an interview between Lynne Tillman and Tom Kennan; a cover by Susan Hiller and archival material from Paranoids Anonymous Newsletter. It is sad to note that after five issues, Maria Fusco is handing off editorial control to a series of guest editors, in which all aspects of the magazine will be rethought, reevaluated and rewritten.

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More from the The Happy Hypocrite

Luca Frei

La Soi-Distant Utopie Du Centre Beaubourg by Albert Meister
An English Translation

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LUCIAN FREUD AND THE ANIMAL

Ines Rüttinger & Eva Schmidt

unique exploration of Lucian Freud’s intimate portrayal of animals throughout his career, this sumptuous exhibition catalog ranges from early pen-and-ink studies to the later large oil portraits. Consummate “painter of the flesh” Freud painted animals even more tenderly than people. As with his nude portraits in which no blemish, fold of fat or sign of exhaustion escapes his eye, no detail is lost in the animal portraits, especially his depictions of the affecting symbiotic relationship between animal and human owner. The catalog begins with a reproduction of a poetry book he illustrated in his twenties, The Glass Tower, made during the war in 1944—of pen-and-ink sketches of dead animals—and concludes with oils of solitary horses. Freud, who spoke of his human models as “animals dressed,” makes no distinction between his models, human or animal, in his search for their true natures. With the essay “The Artist as Collector” by curator Ines Rüttinger and substantial texts accompanying each illustration, this is a richly evocative collection of paintings from an extraordinary artist.

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Peter Friedl

Working at Copan

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Peter Friedl

Four or Five Roses

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More from the Black Pocketbook Series

From Berkeley To Berkeley

Objectif Exhibitions 2008 – 2010

Documenting two years of artistic interventions – from the humorous to the pseudo-scientific – at Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp’s progressive new non-profit space. The story is told in a series of interviews with the artists, who discuss how they transform their research into practice, and includes additional material. Objectif Exhibitions is a cross-disciplinary space that combines art, installations, writing, graphic design, curating and teaching. This is a cool, 4-by-6-inch book designed by Will Holder, with inside cover design by Frances Stark and a glossary by Dexter Sinister. Interviewer/interviewee pairs include, Mai Abu ElDahab by Will Holder, Guy Ben-Ner by Jan Verwoert, Mariana Castillo Deball by Giovanni Carmine, Christian Jankowski by Raimundas Malasauskas along with many more.

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FRONT DESK / BACK OFFICE

The Secret World of Galleries in 39 Pictures and Two Texts

“Subversive” may be the best description for this little volume pointing out that commercial art galleries are schizophrenic; they explicitly present things with an intellectual and aesthetic value, while on the other hand the experience most definitely has a price tag attached. Rob Hamelijnck presents a selection of photographs he took – mostly without permission – of the pristine front desks and messy back rooms of galleries around the world, and reveals the hidden side of the art machine. Essays by French architect Thibaut de Ruyter and Dutch sociologist Olav Velthuis address provocative questions such as, “Why do all galleries have the same mid-century chairs?” and “Why doesn’t the high-heeled young woman at the door ever say hello?” The book is the second of the limited editions produced in the Fucking Good Art series.

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HAMISH FULTON

Walking Transformation

Andreas Baur & Tina Plokarz (Eds.)

For over 40 years British artist Hamish Fulton has been transforming walks into works of art. From Soho to Saskatchewan, from his home in Kent to the peaks of Nepal, he has trekked, hiked and trudged the world in solitude covering between 30 and 50 miles a day, depending on the terrain, in all weathers. His walks all over the world, conveyed in wall drawings and images, photographs and objects, quietly protest the excesses of urbanization in a sympathetic but uncompromising way. Walking Transformation, the new exhibition catalog documenting the nucleus of the recent exhibition at Villa Merkel in Esslingen, chronicles his walks in Tibet and India. With essays by writers Andreas Baur, Freddy Langer, and Tina Plokarz and illustrated with 30 color plates of works and installations from the exhibition.

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Bettina Funcke

Pop or Populus
Art Between high and Low

The alienation between high culture and its public is a fundamental conflict of art in our times. Writer Bettina Funcke, the United States editor of the cutting-edge British art journal Parkett, develops a theory of contemporary art in response to our moment, when artists and critics must respond to art’s unprecedented popularity. Selecting texts from important philosophers and art theorists of the last century, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Rancière, Theodor W. Adorno, Clement Greenberg, Benjamin Buchloh, and Boris Groys, Funcke uses the theoretical framework they provide to explore a dialectic of art propelled by tension between the enduring history of art and the domineering presence of mass culture. Funcke’s work has also been published in Afterall, Artforum, Public and Texte zur Kunst.

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Maria Fusco

The Mechanical Copula

“The first thing you notice is nothing. It takes your eyes a little while to get used to this, after ten seconds you can’t remember looking at anything else,” writes Maria Fusco, founding editor of The Happy Hypocrite, in “How You Lost the Stars,” part of her first collection of short stories. Stripping bare the accord of culture and commodity, this sequence of stories tracks the slimy path of social mobility with serious playfulness and an eye for the absurd. Tales of Donald Sutherland fucking a doll, two men eating a clown and how the obsessive searching through garbage cans can transform trash into meaning, this is a book about the porous relationship between the extra-mundane and the average. Maria Fusco is Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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